Alexa celebrity voices ditched by Amazon with no refunds
If you’ve been saving up to integrate Shaq’s voice into your Alexa devices, you’ve officially done so. Amazon is leaving out all the voices of Alexa-enabled celebrities, including Shaquille O’Neal, Melissa McCarthy, and Samuel L. Jackson, let’s just say it isn’t. Premium audio options are no longer available for purchase and will no longer work even if you purchased some time ago, as reported by The Verge.
Which brings us back to the point, and it looks like there won’t be any. This is not alarming news as the volume options launched at just $1 before moving to $5 in recent months. However, it’s never fun for consumers to buy something and have it evaporate. We’ve reached out to Amazon for clarification on these refunds and will update when we hear back.
Samuel L. Jackson has already moved the barn, and the purchase page has an official announcement of his avatar’s early retirement. Melissa McCarthy and Shaq are still engaged, but only until September.
First, this feature was an addition to Alexa that turned her regular songs into celebrity songs. All of this was somewhat limited compared to all of Alexa’s features, as celebrities don’t do reminders and don’t integrate many skills. They do, however, tell jokes, answer questions, and perform simple tasks using voice. The service started with Jackson in 2019, but expanded to include Shaq and McCarthy soon after.
So why did Amazon shut down the feature? Alexa is no longer the most exciting thing in the universe, and the company’s hardware division recently laid off thousands of people involved in the design and manufacture of Echo speakers, so that could be part of that. Again, the feature set for these sounds was on the anemic side, so perhaps not enough people bought them to offset the licensing costs. Finally, there is an AI elephant in the room. Reports suggest Amazon is building its own large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT to radically transform Alexa, and celebrity voices may not fit into that vision.
